Announcement of commencement of Debt Financing Services

Published Date : 28/03/2013

As part of its ongoing endeavor to strengthen services towards the real estate industry in India, Cushman & Wakefield in India announces the launch of the ‘Debt Financing’ Services as part of its Capital Markets division. With this, the current portfolio of financial services is expanded to include both private and public sector bank funding as well as investment sales.

Sanjay Dutt, Executive Managing Director, South Asia, Cushman & Wakefield, commented “This widened capability in debt and equity advisory is in addition to our traditional capital markets and land industrial activities making us the preferred one stop shop for real estate capital markets services throughout India.”

Sanjay said, “The Indian real estate sector has been growing steadily over the years, despite government regulations on funding options for development in the last few years. The RBI directives also increased the risk weightage on Real Estate further discouraged financial institutions from making highly speculative investments. This has led to a severe shortage of funding options. While private equity and investments from HNI have their limitations, financing from domestic Institutional investors is a very viable option. Public sector financial institutions can provide debt at lower rates as well as for longer periods which makes them an attractive option. However, such financing is also skeptical about the project that they enter.”

Sanjay further added, “It is estimated that debt worth over US$ 24 Billion has been loaned out to the real estate and development sector and is further estimated to rise moderately by the end of FY 2012- 13. Commercialization of more public sector had resulted in their increased willingness to provide funding to large infrastructure and real estate projects at reasonable rate of return.”

This Debt Financing Services will be complementing Capital Markets Group, which currently provides services such as structured equity and debt services, capital advisory including equity raising for pooled funds and programmatic club and joint venture transactions and development project funding.